A road map for assessing blockchain health care startups

Blockchain-backed health care startups are all the rage right now, and a new open-source tool that tracks data about startups in the aim to help potential investors navigate the pile of startups clamouring for their time and money.

"Blockchain" truly is the buzzword of 2018. In February this year Reuters reported that companies who added "blockchain" to their name experienced a temporary boost in share price, and it's being applied to health care in a very big way.

Andy Coravos, the CEO of Elektra Labs, and Noah Zimmerman, the Director of Health Data and Design Innovation Center at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, wrote a piece about the project in the health and medicine news website Stat about the "most promising blockchain projects in the health care ecosystem" and how buyers and investors should be aware of startups that could be taking them for a ride.

"After reviewing more than 150 white papers, one thing is clear: many of these blockchain projects fall somewhere between half-baked and overly optimistic, with strong marketing teams and shaky technical fortitude (we excluded the outright scams, and strove to be generous to the remaining early projects)," reads the Stat piece by Coravos and Zimmerman.

The researchers on this project established a set of criteria and questions that they used to establish if a blockchain project is "quality," as they put it. Some of these questions include: "Does the project have a technical white paper that outlines the project roadmap?", "Does the project have a demo or working project?" and "Does the project publish a public code base?"

Other metrics that are tracked include funding and how funding is raised.

"Health care blockchains have raised hundreds of millions of dollars of capital which will be deployed in the next few months or years," reads the Stat piece. "(A)nd these projects will form the foundation of our healthcare system for years to come."